


Jump in the Fire

by messageredacted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:44:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel can’t understand Ruby’s reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jump in the Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Прыжок в огонь](https://archiveofourown.org/works/923587) by [Rassda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rassda/pseuds/Rassda)



> Takes place immediately after Heaven and Hell. Originally written 8 February 2009.

In this new body she could be his sister, small and dark and attractive. Ruby knows that the humans can’t see it but Castiel does not look human to her. He is wearing a mask and his light leaks around the edges, through the eyeholes and between the lips like how the demons look when he exorcises them, except quiet and constant. He is to the exorcisms as the sunrise is to a bonfire: silent and brilliant and connected to something so much larger.

She doesn’t know what he sees when he looks at her--a crawling thing, maybe. A snake in a mask. She remembers Dean seeing her real face before he died, seeing her with the eyes of the damned. How disgusting she was to him. She is the absence of light, a void. She wonders briefly, in a split second flash of thought, whether she would warm in his light if they were to touch, or if she would suck it into herself and leave him cold.

##

Sam keeps the door to the motel room mostly shut, letting out a slice of yellow light from the room beyond. She doesn’t know why; Dean is okay with her now, for the most part. Perhaps it’s just habit.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do to you,” Sam whispers. He has sad eyes.

Ruby crosses her arms, wincing a little. She wants to say, _what the hell did you expect them to do?_ But instead: “I did.”

He stares her as if he’s never seen her before, and that hurts, it really does. “Then why did you do it?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it and shrugs, immediately regretting it when it tugs at the wound in her stomach. She licks the back of her teeth.

 _Redemption_ , she thinks. “Because it was the only thing that would have worked.”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Sam, it’s done. Get over it.” She says it sharply and feels a little vindicated when he winces. “Look, I’m not interested in your pity.”

“You’re leaving again.” It isn’t a question.

“Alastair is gone,” Ruby replies. “I mean _gone_. When an angel does something like that… you don’t come back from that. Things have changed down below, and I have to see what’s up.”

“Be careful.”

She softens despite herself. “I will.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but he continues to watch her as she turns away, which is something. She’s halfway across the parking lot when she hears the door shut.

Something blossoms in her chest, an unexpected burn of acid behind her ribcage. She doesn’t need to hear the faintest rush of wings.

The angel of Thursdays is there, standing in a knob of shadow a few feet away. His face is shadowed but she still squints and turns away.

“Thought you might show up,” she says, forcing bravado.

Castiel doesn’t answer. She risks a glance and sees him studying her. His expression is something like bemusement. The fact that he has an expression at all gives her pause, and on the heels of that, she realizes that he is not the blinding flame he appeared to be before. Maybe she’s comparing him to the light that Anna became, but he seems to be…smudged.

“Coming to kill me?” she ventures. “Because I think… we’re kind of playing for the same team here.”

“We’re not on the same team,” he says immediately, almost too quickly. In her peripheral vision, something flutters, a brief annoyed twitch.

She turns to face him fully. “I’m not talking good or evil here. I’m talking Winchesters.”

Castiel takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter what your intentions are.” His voice is quiet, not angry. “We can’t abide by you here. If we see you again, you won’t survive it.”

There is something in his words that niggles at the back of Ruby’s mind. She smiles a little, leaning forward. “ ‘We’? Are you sure? Because I think you’re willing to bend the rules if you need to, aren’t you?” She cocks her head to the side. “Is that why you’re starting to look so… gray?”

He reaches out and touches her forehead, a casual and completely unexpected move. Ruby freezes in place. His palm is cool and soft and human, his fingers curling at her hairline. He says nothing, just stares at her, his face smoothed back into non-expression.

She has an overwhelming desire to close her eyes and wait for it. She could pull away, could run, but if he really wants to, he can track her down. There is nothing she can do about it.

She doesn’t close her eyes.

“You led Alastair to an ambush,” Castiel says.

Her mouth twists. “I was never his friend.”

He blinks once and revises. “You let yourself be tortured to lead another demon to an ambush to save an _angel_.”

Ruby’s mouth dampens. There is sweat on her forehead inside the cup of his hand. He hasn’t moved and neither has she.

“I did what I had to do.”

Something flickers across his face again, a sudden surge of emotion, anger and confusion and envy all at the same time, there and gone but so strong that Ruby is startled.

“ _You didn’t have to do it_ ,” he says harshly.

The acid fear that she has felt since his arrival suddenly drains into calm. “But I did,” she finishes for him.

He lets his hand drop. She sways at the loss of the support. He is staring at her.

“There are more than two sides to this,” Ruby says quietly, hanging onto that calm inside of herself.

He hesitates for a second more, and she almost thinks that he’s going to say something. But then there is the same velvet shush of wind and he is gone.


End file.
